The Mockbuster

aka: Mock Buster

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A clever rat knows how to get the freshest ingredients: by stealing from another restaurant — or animation studio, as the case may be...

"Another great knock-off is DVDs. The ones that are slight variations of slightly animated kids' movies. The kind they put right next to the check-out line, so Grandma might accidentally mistake it for the real thing. And they have titles like, The Secret Princess and Her Oppressive Authority Figure 4, and the always-popular Jungle Animals in Decidedly Non-Jungle Situations."

In principle, the Mockbuster is a bit like a movie with an Alternative Pornographic Name, but there's generally no nudity. It's not part of a pair of Battling Films, because it can't even afford the fare to get to the ring where the shows duke it out. A mockbuster is a movie that is suspiciously similar to another more popular, more well-known — and, let's face it, more "real" — movie, to the point of being the copy of an entire film. Why? Trying to Make Money Off a Popular Idea, of course.

Because they're generally made by no-name studios to make a quick buck, the biggest difference between mockbusters and the movies they're based on is budget. The mockbuster has serious budget restrictions. Think "three kids with a cellphone" production values. The writing is usually subpar, too—the producers aren't striving for Genuine Artistry; they're trying to rip off a more popular idea in an attempt to con gullible consumers. Of course, depending on what they're copying, and the fact that it's probably not out yet when they start making the mockbuster, the original might not have been such a cinematic masterpiece itself.

However, if there's one thing mockbusters can do well, it's Duplicate Titles. Their designs and logos, like the colors of a viceroy butterfly, are designed to resemble the "real" movies they're copying as closely as possible. Remember, Titles Usually Fib. They also pick titles similar to the original, often containing similar words, or made-up words that sound the same.

The people mockbusters tend to appeal to seem to fall into four brackets: kids too young to know the difference between the real deal and the fake; people who might get the two confused when looking for something for their kids and grandkids; parental Propriety Police who want to get their children The Upstanding Alternative to a mainstream film that is more in line with their values; and Nerds, who aren't fooled at all, but who watch them for their awesome badness. Bad stuff is interesting! As such, they tend to be sold in supermarket magazine racks, pharmacy gift racks, and grab bags in outlet shops.

The rare cases of mockbusters that might actually try to do something "artistic" are those adapting Out Of Copyright works, though again, generally only if a more "popular" story adapting the same work came out recently. This phenomenon sometimes applies to live theater as well with regards to public domain works (Pixie Stories, The Theater Spirit) that have had a more popular version created that smaller theater companies could never produce on their own. Alternately, sometimes a degree of artistic merit comes in when the cast/crew Ham Up The Cheesy Movie.

Mockbusters tend to be made in countries outside of the US, as if in "response" to a coming American blockbuster. Those might change the plot based unobtanium to something more in touch with their national sensibilities (the Indian Ultraguy mockbuster has him getting his powers from a god, for example) and the genre might skew towards one more popular in that country (the Brazilian series Non-Villains is somewhat like a soap opera).

For its English dubs Video Brinquedo uses 4Kids' regular voice actors note When Lisa Ortiz was asked about doing a voice for Ratatoing, she responded: "The strangest thing about that is... is that you've heard of it."

Because of the problems between South Korea and Japan, anime was not available to Koreans. Because of this, in the 70's and 80's, the South Korean animation industry produced many films that were ripped off from mecha anime and toys. Later, a fella by the name of Joseph Lai and his company, IFD note The same folks who brought us the Godfrey Ho Ninja Movies and, in turn, Pierre Kirby , bought up the rights to some of these films, dubbed them into English, and edited bits and pieces of them together into new, incomprehensible forms like Space Thunder Kids. The more obvious ripoffs include:

The same company also made The Secret of Anastasia just as Don Bluth's Anastasia was released in theaters. Especially odd in that they weren't satisfied ripping off just one movie, but they also ripped off Beauty and the Beast by having the rest of the royal family transformed into talking musical instruments!

They've also done The Amazing Feats of Young Hercules, Moses: Egypt's Great Prince and ripped off Pocahontas, Cinderella, Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid, and others. They even made a Christmas special called "The Christmas in Cartoontown" (re-released as "The Night Before Christmas in Cartoontown"), which, while not knocking off a specific film, put some of their fairy tale characters in a Christmas setting.

Right when Brave hit the big screen in 2012, a DVD called Braver started appearing on UK shelves, with a remarkably familiar front cover featuring a red-haired heroine in a green dress standing in front of a circle of standing stones. It turns out this one isn't even a knock-off; it's an entirely unrelated 2005 movie called A Fairy Tale Christmas (IMDB page here) which was hastily repackaged and rereleased to cash in. The new cover and title have nothing to do with the movie at all, and the main character Angela is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed princess who wears pink, making her look more like Aurora than Merida. Review here.

This one (and other repackagings by the same company called Tangled Up, The Little Cars, and The Frog Princess) led to a successful prosecution for passing off by Disney in the UK, which may put a stop to this trope there.

There's also another attempt to rip off Brave called Kiara the Brave, which was originally a completely unrelated Indian animation called Super K. The title character, Kiara, apparently barely appears, and only gets pushed because she's a red-headed princess.

Early in 2012, Back to the Sea was released, which is essentially Finding NemoAS AN ANIME! Bonus points for the Covers Always Lie, which paints it as a CGI movie along the lines of Finding Nemo or Shark Tale… even though the actual special uses 2-D animation.

Similar to what happened with The Thief and the Cobbler, this happened to The Legend of Sarila.. Which is better known by its other title Frozen Land. While the logo and title are ripoffs of Frozen the actual film has no similarities other than them both taking place in snowy environments.

The Asylum is a company that only makes mockbusters and bad "Christian" movies, and are quite cynical about it. In fact, there's a news article in their website that states (and these are the actual words they use) "We've decided to use some of the billions of dollars we've made ripping people off..." The majority of the examples on this page are Asylum productions. A blog entry advertising a sale on their films: "You'd have to illegally download to get a better deal than that... but then you'd just be stooping to our level...". Their DVD covers have quotes from uncredited sources, which is illegal, unless they're making those up, too.

The Almighty Thor, featuring a Thor with an Uzi. Asylum, you've done it again!

Universal successfully sued The Asylum for their movie American Battleship for being too obvious of an attempt to fool viewers into thinking it's Battleship. The Asylum had to change the name of their movie to American Warships. It's still rented and sold in many countries as American Battleship, though (and damned if you can find out who made the film from its cover; it's nowhere to be found).

AVH: Alien Vs. Hunter, which despite its source pulls out a surprising twist ending the hunter aliens are humans...from another planet.

Atlantic Rim. The monsters attack New York. When it was released on disc in June 2013, its page on Amazon.co.uk had a note saying (approximately) "Were you looking for Pacific Rim? Click here to be notified when the real thing comes out."

The Day The Earth Stopped — Notable for prompting Fox to threaten to take legal action, though said threat wasn't carried out

DeathRacers (whose cover art also bears a strong Death Proof influence), note that Violent J of the Insane Clown Posse who stars in it said that this movie is "the bootleg ripoff fake version" of Death Racers at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos. Interestingly, it is a ripoff of a remake, but is closer to the original than said remake.

The Asylum were given a court order preventing them releasing The Age of Hobbits three days before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. How did they think they'd get away with that, when "Hobbit" is a trademark of the Tolkien estate? Because "Hobbits" in their title refers to Homo floresiensis,obviously.

I Am Omega, which even also bills itself as an adaptation of the book I Am Legend. Their choice of "Omega" is interesting because The Omega Man was the title of a previous film adaptation of I Am Legend.

King of the Lost World, which claimed to be based on Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World, but was a clear King Kong ripoff. In fact, the cover art even went so far as to point out that Doyle's book inspired King Kong (1933) (which is true, but hardly justifies such ridiculousness). It also says that the "story" it's based on inspired Jurassic Park!

There's an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "The Land that Time Forgot" released just in time to counter the Land of the Lost movie.

The Mega Shark franchise is getting on in the action with an Attack on Titan mockbuster entitled Mega Shark vs Kolossus in which Mega Shark fights a Humongous Mecha version of the Colossal Titan. The Japanese release is even set to be called Mega Shark vs the Titan

Paranormal Entity. Its sequel 8213: GACY HOUSE is apparently some kind of Paranormal Activity 2 rip-off. It was actually released in the UK as Paranormal Entity 2 (though it's more likely that it was due to the John Wayne Gacy case not being as well known outside the US).

Princess Of Mars. Made it out while the legitimate adaptation was still stuck in Development Hell. Comes from The Asylum, which gives away the intention. May be a mockbuster of Avatar instead based on the promotional material. Starring Traci Lords in the title role.

Transmorphers and Transmorphers: Fall of Man. Although the funny thing about this is that the Transmorphers movies are Terminator ripoffs with a Transformers-sounding name. In fact, it blatantly steals elements from the Transformers films (the robots do transform, albeit badly & slowly & they are extraterrestrial in origin), The Matrix trilogy (insofar as fashion) and the Terminator films (particularly Salvation). Trifecta! For the toys, there is Beast Tech Fighter, Quick Change, etc.

Following The Asylum's footsteps is TomCat Films LLC which includes a major numbers of mockbusters amongst few others that makes The Asylum look like 20th Century Fox by comparison, this includes...

Metal Man, aka Iron Hero, which is a mockbuster of the first Iron Man film but features bad characterization, dodgy special effects and suits and even Reggie Bannister of Phantasm fame who is not only the creator of the Metal Man suit but comes off as an asshole and dickish mentor to the hero of the movie. See Film Brain and Obscurus Lupa tear this movie apart.

Bruno Mattei, the director of the aforementioned Mockbuster, also directed Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws. For an extensive look into Mattei's films, check out The Bruno Mattei Show, in which Brad Jones discusses the man's filmography with Ed Glaser, Noah Antwiler and other friends. It's quite insightful into how a mockbuster comes to be. For that matter, Bruno's career consisted almost entirely of Nazisploitation and Mockbusters, though these were never mutually exclusive. It's almost too bad he's dead - his ripoff of Inglourious Basterds would be... something.

Later in 2010, Eric Parkinson, who used to be president of Hemdale (which also made the first Terminator movie), tried to make a cheap CGI animated spin-off of the franchise called Terminator 3000, but production on that movie is being halted due to a cease-and-detest letter he received from Pacificor, the owner of the Terminator franchise rights. However, Eric has spoken that he kept the animation rights to the franchise under Hemdale when he sold the live-action sequel rights to Carolco in 1990, and that he took those rights with him when Hemdale closed down.

Back in 1990, there was Terminator II. Which was actually released before the official sequel. Humorously enough, Terminator II is actually a remake of Aliens.

The War of the Worlds actually got two mockbusters to go with the Spielberg film. One of which apparently actually follows the original story by HG Wells and sets the invasion in Victorian Britain.).

After the Ju-on franchise had two Direct-to-Video features, two theatrical movies, and an American remake on the way, Ju-Rei came along to copy it as an even cheaper DTV version than the first two were.

Starcrash may be more (in)famous, but The Humanoid beats it for sheer plagiarism. Whenever possible, props and costumes (and even entire scenes) are copied wholesale from A New Hope, to the point that Starcrash seems completely original in comparison.

A number of Bruno Mattei's films. The best known are:

Terminator II, as stated above (It's actually more of an Aliens ripoff.)

Hell of the Living Dead, not content with trying to shoe horn this movie into Romero lore, Bruno Mattei lifted much of the soundtrack from Dawn of the Dead (1978), as well as Contamination (which was a rip of Alien) to score this. Even the uniforms are similar to those in Dawn.

This was a big problem in Italy during the Spaghetti Western craze of the Sixties. The relaxed copyright law in Italy at the time meant as soon as a character got popular, knockoff movies would appear seeming to star that character. Django, Sabata and Sartana were famous for having their names recycled in knockoffs. (They couldn't do this to the most popular Spaghetti Western character ever, for reasons which are quite obvious if you think about it a little, but it didn't stop one film claiming to be "The Return of Clint the Stranger".)

Actually, the so-called "Man With No Name" is named in each film, only it's different each time (Joe, Manco and Blondie, in order).

While Curse of the Ring doesn't have anything to do with the Lord of the Rings movies, and is in fact originally called Ring of the Nibelungs - the plot being based off of the Sigfried/Brunhilde/Fafnir saga - the movie's marketing and even logo font really, REALLY tries hard to be mistaken for a Lord of the Rings movie.

The Executioner Part 2 — no Executioner Part 1.

Almost everything released by Video Asia, the masters of In-Name-Only Sequels. One of the worst offenders, they don't even make their own mockbusters: they just rerelease old foreign movies with different titles.

Somewhat unfairly, the original Battlestar Galactica movie was accused early on of being a rip off of Star Wars - presumably on the basis that after Star Wars debuted, ANY movie set in space was ripping off Star Wars. Legal action was even mooted - but sensibly quickly dropped when it became clear that a setting in space was really the only obvious link between the two.

LadyTerminator—basically the same as its namesake, but instead of an android, it's an archaeologist possessed by the Queen of the South Sea. Other than that, according to The Cinema Snob, if you haven't seen Terminator, but you've seen Lady Terminator, you've seen Terminator.

Bloody Murder,◊ which is about a group of young people hired to fix up and act as the counselors of a secluded summer camp with a dark past involving a drowned boy. Unfortunately for them, a maniac adorned in a hockey mask starts knocking them off. Sound familiar? There was even a character named Jason. When he disappears, we get several scenes of people asking "Where's Jason?" or "Have you seen Jason?"

1981 saw the release of Srigala, an Indonesian rip-off of Friday the 13th which went as far as doing a shot-for-shot recreation of the infamous ending scare.

Subverted with Boy Eats Girl; it was never intended to be a Scary Movie mockbuster, but its Scandinavian title, Scary Video 5, gives the impression of this (fourScary Movie movies had been made at the time when Boy Eats Girl went on video).

Poseidon Rex, a monster film featuring an amphibious dinosaur that threatens the human race. It had already been on DVD since October 2013, but it was given a special theatrical release in April 2014 to get some more publicity in the wake of the hype surrounding Godzilla (2014).

Codename Wild Geese - cunningly disguised as a sequel to The Wild Geese, complete with Lewis Collins who was apparently fired off Wild Geese II for his role in the rip-off, having had a contract with Wild Geese producer Euan Lloyd.

The Hamas made kid's show Tomorrow's Pioneers features characters who are blatant ripoffs of American cartoons, though said characters are given radical Islamist twists by the writers.

Belarus' state-owned television station briefly produced and ran a sitcom called The Theorists which was about a group of nerdy physicists who befriend their attractive female neighbor. Yes, it was an unauthorized copy of The Big Bang Theory. CBS and Warner Bros. had actually begun legal proceedings when the cast and producers of The Theorists discovered their show was a ripoff note the higher ups at the station had told them that it was a legitimately licensed remake, which was not true. and quit en masse, forcing its cancellation..

A Chinese quiz show copied the visuals of the German show TV total and its segment Blamieren oder kassieren, merely spicing them up a bit with stuff such as wacky animal mascots. TVT's hosts called it out, then in turn jokingly stole the additions.

It was revealed that this was set up by ZDF Neo and the Chinese have no clue TV total exists.

Aryamaan - Brahmaand Ka Yoddha, an Indian knockoff Star Wars. It is a rare case of a movie franchise being ripped off by an entire TV series. The show itself is referred to by its producer as "Indian version of the famous Star Wars", but its such a blatant knockoff that it can't even be considered a "version". Aside from the obvious lightsaber ripoffs, the opening also is the famous Opening Scroll (but in Hindi!), the "Thar Planet" is very clearly a Tatooine knockoff, there is a superweapon that resembles the Death Star with a grimacing face, the robot Tobot bears a striking resemblance to C-3PO,a planet is seen being destroyed in Alderaan fashion, the king's multiple wives wear saffron robes very similar to those of Padme's handmaidens, and many, many more.

Literature

The Russian / Eastern Bloc books series The Wizard Of The Emerald City was a re-telling of the Oz stories by L. Frank Baum. In some editions, in the afterword the Russian Author, Volkov, acknowledged the 'inspiration', but more often this was omitted when printing. As the series was published in 1939, this makes it Older Than Television - though barely so.

The Tumblr "Imagine Your OTP" lists romantic scenarios for shippers to insert their favorite pairings into. Similarly to the above example, a simple typo reversing two letters gets you to the parody blog. "Imagine Yuor" OTP lists twisted, overly violent, or just plain bizarre situations that only a troll shipper would want to imagine. The blog still manages to get asks from users who confused it with the original and wonder why a romantic shipping blog would post such creepy scenarios.

There are definitely many expies of the Angry Video Game Nerd, but the only one that probably could qualify as a mockbuster is Isvaffel, mainly because his earlier videos from 2009 showed Angry Video Game Nerd in the title and because he still remained that title in his intro.

Since the source novel is in the public domain, musical versions of The Phantom of the Opera ran rampant in the 1990s (regional tours, community theaters, etc.) to cash in on Andrew Lloyd Webber's adaptation — enough so that Time magazine did a whole article on the phenomenon. But not all of them qualified as this trope: Ken Hill's version was the one that inspired Lloyd Webber to take his own stab at the story in the first place, and Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit's Phantom was actually written around the same time as Lloyd Webber's but couldn't get produced until afterwards due to the competition. One of the mockbusters was videotaped and later released on DVD, and the Phantom Reviewer took it on.

Cirque Productions and Le Grand Cirque are companies that are this to Cirque du Soleil (seriously, compare the websites), to the point that the former was sued for using "Cirque" in their name; it didn't work since that's just the French word for "circus". Judging from reviews at Ticketmaster's website, the former's shows have successfully tricked ticket buyers who didn't do the research and thought they saw an actual CDS show. It doesn't help that until 2006 CDS tours only visited major cities, and thus knockoff troupes could make hay by visiting places that weren't. Alternatively, knockoffs often have extended runs in casino-heavy towns like Atlantic City and Reno as opposed to Las Vegas, where the real deal has put down roots.

The album of Jesus Christ Superstar was released before the theatre show or movie were, resulting in multiple adaptations touring the stages before the official release.

Video Games

The company Gameloft applies a similar concept to video games, where they release shameless copies of well-known franchises (usually on cellphones); the difference here is that their games are usually quite well-made (although some of them, most notably the Mac OS X and 3DS ports of Gangstar: Miami and Asphalt, respectively, were met with negative reception, being that they were lazily ported especially Gangstar, having outdated graphics compared to the the ones they were imitating). One of their more interesting examples is Shrek Kart, which copies Mario Kart but replaces the cast of well-known characters with a different cast of well-known characters rather than a bunch of Captain Ersatz's (unlike with most of their games).

Another thing that makes Gameloft less of a negative thing than other examples on this page: almost all of the games they copy have not yet been released on cellphones/iOS, so they serve a positive role in bringing the genre to mobiles, instead of just competing with better alternatives. Being a subsidary of Ubisoft they're able to use their licenses such as Assassin's Creed and Brothers in Arms, to make mobile/iOS games as well.

There is a webgame called Chick'n Bash. It's especially odd because there are plenty of other webgames in the "smash the tower" genre that have vastly different aesthetics from Angry Birds.

There's a similar one called Chicks'n'Vixens.

On the non-avian side, there's Angry Bunnies.

An app known as "Hedgehog Dash" was released in 2013. A very blatant Sonic the Hedgehog rip-off. The logo for it was basically identical to the Sonic Dash logo. It disappeared just as soon as it came, without obscure reason.

A significant portion of the indie games one can find on Xbox Live Marketplace turn out to be rip-offs of popular games, past and present, including a particularly cheap Minecraft clone titled CastleMiner that even got a zombie-oriented sequel less than four months after its release.

The Chinese PC game Duludubi Star is a bizarre knockoff of Super Mario Galaxy. With Mario replaced with a baby dragon, voice clips stolen from Klonoa, and the Jeopardy! theme, of all things.

In December of 2012, Hammerpoint Interactive (In which a member of them, Sergey Titov, worked on Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing) released a ridiculously poorly made MMO clone of the famous zombie mod DayZ, creatively titled The War Z (Now titled Infestation: Survivor Stories). Let's just say that many, many gamers are not amused.

It gets better. Six months development time (despite Hammerpoint insisting otherwise), the developers effectively banning people at random in an inane attempt to get rid of hackers, among other things, and a month before "release", their trademark over the game's name was taken away from them because of Paramount, who had their own trademark for an intended World War Z game, and "The War Z" was obviously way too similar. Naturally, the response from Hammerpoint is to claim this is not the case, despite all evidence against them, until suddenly complying and changing the name as above.

Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta appears at first to be just another Action Adventure game, but playing it reveals to have aped a lot of more popular games, with the Uncharted series being the main target.

That Hunchback had already been converted to the Amstrad CPC didn't stop Blaby Computer Games from releasing The Bells, which had the same premise and similar gameplay but painfully bad programming.

Q Kitty Garden appears to be a knockoff of Mushroom Garden in the garden part.

One of the oldest examples in video games is Crazy Kong, a knockoff of Donkey Kong with original programming. Surprisingly, this seems to have been the authorized arcade version of Donkey Kong in some parts of the world.

Mega Man actually managed to do this with another Mega Man game, with the DOS version of Mega Man 3, which is a completely different - and inferior - game to the NES Mega Man 3, made by a different company. Not only was the game titled such to cash in on the original (to the point that there is no DOS Mega Man 2; they completely skipped over it,) but they invented a robot master that looks like the robot on the original cover (who is Spark Man in the NES game) to justify using the exact same cover.

Harcourt's Mega MathEdutainment Game series was a Mockbuster of Edmark's Mighty Math series. Not only did the two cover the same topics, many of the activities were very similar (e.g. using fiery explosions to teach fractions, using buried treasure to teach the number line), both had the Grow Slide feature, and the logos for each series had the same font! Ironically, after a series of buyouts both series are currently owned by Houghton Mifflin (though only the Mighty Math series continues to be sold by them as it was the original).

No-one actually owns the Tycoon trademark, so for every good tycoon game like RollerCoaster Tycoon or Zoo Tycoon there are dozens, if not hundreds, of no-budget knockoffs pumped out to capitalize on the name.

Titus Software, in their early years, produced the Classiques series of games for the Amstrad CPC and other then-popular computers. These releases consisted of compilations of generic knockoffs of famous Arcade Games.

The BBC Micro had a whole ton of rip-off clones of popular arcade games of the time, many of them produced by Acornsoft itself. So instead of Galaga we got Zalaga, Frogger became Hopper, Asteroids became Meteors, Space Invaders became Super Invaders, Donkey Kong became (the less similar-sounding) Killer Gorilla and so on.

The Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Dragon 32 also used to have lots of knock-offs during the early times of their lifespan. Eventually programmers could not hide themselves behind clones anymore as some mighty companies like Ocean Software bought the actual arcade rights to convert the games themselves and were actually striving to remove knock-offs from the shelves so they started creating their own original ideas.

There was once a video game company known as Phoenix Games, which hilariously touted itself as "The only European super budget publisher" note Even if it would mean that they live by making a quick buck from No Budget video games it would still be lying, as it was Midas Interactive that pioneered such a business model. The quality of their games implies that their definition of "super budget" is very different from the usual. Many of their games are obviously trying to pass themselves off as video game adaptations of well-known Disney cartoons, including beloved classics like Snow White And The Seven Clever Boys, Lion And The King 3, Mighty Mulan, and the now infamous Dalmatians 3.

A lot of Rainbow Arts early output is this. Though they would abandon their position once they established highly-selling original video game franchises.

Katakis, which was made for the Commodore Amiga, was their rip-off of the video game R-Type. Funny enough, Irem saw this, but since most Japanese publishers had trouble with the machine and because they made a very good port for the machine, they hired them to port R-Type to the Amiga.

On the ZX Spectrum, after the initial wave of Arcade Game clones died off, Harry S Price made something of a career of ripping off obscure commercial releases and type-in games from magazines, slightly modifying them and publishing them under different titles.

Evil Night, an arcade Rail Shooter released by Konami in 1998, is very much a ripoff of Sega'sThe House of the Dead, which came out the same year. The premise and several of the characters are quite similar (with two of the three protagonists being obvious copies of Thomas Rogan and G). The game was clearly meant to piggyback off of the popularity of the franchise that inspired it, but eventually spiraled into obscurity when House of the Dead fans christened it a "knockoff" and its problematic arcade hardware helped it disappear from arcades. Recently, the game seems to have generated a cult following of sorts.

The Ukrainian company GSC Game World, of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fame, made a game called Warcraft 2000 during the 1990s. This was a glorified mod of Warcraft 2, sold as an official sequel. The plot was about grey aliens manipulating Orcs and Humans to wage war.

The Legend of Lucky Pie is a stylistic knockoff of Adventure Time produced by a handful of young Chinese animators. It stars a humanoid boy named Lucky Pie and a shape-shifting horse named Lucky Ge who go on adventures in a strange fantasy land.

The Amanda Show parodied this in a recurring sketch. People were returning movies they got from a movie store that were knockoffs of whatever they really wanted, created by a family of foreigners (which they always contend is "MUCH BETTER!"). The icing on the cake is that the store itself was a knock-off of Blockbuster, "Blockblister". And though almost never featured in the skits, on the boards behind the proprietors, there's almost always a Mockbustered up title of a Nick movie: Rag Rats, Harriet the Guy, Good Booger and Snowy Day (one skit actually has this featured).

Be Kind Rewind is about a pair of video store owners who make their own mockbusters after all their tapes are destroyed, and become a massive success after their remakes grow wildly popular. Accusations of copyright infringement cause the store to be closed down.

Monty Python's Flying Circus made fun of Mockbusters well before they were even a phenomena, with the Mr. Dibley sketch , about a filmmaker who makes hideously bad, silent, one-reel versions of famous movies starring random people from shops.

"Oh yes, well, I mean, there were some people who said my film 2001 - A Space Odyssey was similar to Stanley Kubrick's. I mean, that's the sort of petty critical niggling that's dogged my career. It makes me sick. I mean, as soon as I'd made Midnight Cowboy with the vicar as Ratso Rizzo, John Schlesinger rushes out his version, and gets it premiered while mine's still at the chemist's."

On In Living Color!, this is the stock-in-trade of Funky Finger Productions, which is always looking for investors. Stank Ho was their answer to Pretty Woman, and they had test footage for a fourth Penitentiary movie on hand in another skit. Many have an X Meets Y twist: The Wiz meets Flatliners, for instance.

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